Thursday, 31 January 2013

That's
a heavy keyboard, and it's at least 300 yards off-road, beside
Brislington Brook. Was there some cult ritual played out here?

And
here at Ribblehead, Parker Knoll are proud to show us how to get rid
of that old unmoded suite to make space at home for a new one. Yes,
just like the most successful corporations, you too can externalise your
costs, the British Way.

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Some
very nasty cuts are coming. They're not justified, they're vicious,
they're counterproductive – and they're driven by ideology rather
than any real economic rationale. That's the ideology of 'small
government', or 'private good, public bad' that drives our political and
financial elite and serves their own interests.

It
might never have happened if Westminster's LibDem minority hadn't
been seduced by half-promises of power-sharing, giving the Tories their chance to put the ideology into practice. There's a
lesson in that for all small parties, even if it still seems lost on
the LibDems. Meanwhile, the compliant media back up the cuts with superficial
but persuasive economic cliches to keep people in line, and the main
parliamentary opposition seems scared to risk challenging them .

What
a mess we're in.

So
it's not surprising that BADACA – the Bristol & District Anti
Cuts Alliance – is one of many across the country trying to build an effective
campaign to protect the public services on which so many people rely.

That's
not an easy task. The law's been framed – and the funding managed
– to make it impossible for the people we elect locally, of
whatever party, to contemplate any refusal to implement the
centrally-imposed budget cuts to essential council services. You
can't win: the game's been fixed in advance.

In
Bristol, thanks to those votes last year, all the power now
lies with the mayor, George Ferguson. He can (and seems to) take
advice all round, but when it comes to the budget, he too is just a
player in a pre-rigged game with the government making the rules.
His Cabinet are even less influential, and ward councillors –
whatever rosettes they wore on election day – count for less still.

After
a lot of discussion (and no little dissent), Bristol's Green Party members gave
their backing to one of their councillors (Gus Hoyt) to take up Mayor
Ferguson's offer of a 'Cabinet' position, offering perhaps some small
influence over the cuts, but, more importantly, to help guide other
key policies. It was a difficult decision, forced by a political
structure that the Greens had opposed from the start.

What
it did not mean was that the Greens are propping up a 'Cuts Cabinet'.
This is not a coalition of convenience to secure power; Gus, or no
Gus, Labour or no Labour, the mayor will be making the cuts, or else
the government will step in with sanctions and impose its own cuts.
You've heard the Pickles assessment. That's what they'd do.

This
powerlessness at every local level is deeply frustrating for everyone
who must watch the dismantling of public services – and it's
beginning to show. Some elements of BADACA are expressing their own
frustration by singling out the Greens as somehow being the
'villains', colluding with a common enemy. That's an awful pity at a time when solidarity is
what's needed.

If
the cuts are to be resisted, it can only be through Westminster.
The LibDems, who could conceivably pull the rug out from the cuts
programme, show not the slightest inclination. They're an integral
part of the problem. Labour looks embarrassingly lame. Grass
roots revolution looks as unlikely as ever, and it's hard to imagine
the unions using their muscle.

That
only leaves the big local authorities. If we think it's bad here
in Bristol, it's even worse for the big northern cities. If only
they could get together in effective opposition, conceivably the
government would find itself unable to throw the legal book at all
of them.

It's
seriously unlikely to happen, of course, and still less likely that
those Labour held councils would want to broaden their campaign by
welcoming 'independent' Bristol into it.... but it's a more
promising scenario than silly infighting within the anti-cuts
movement.

Friday, 18 January 2013

The
coalition puppeteers in London may be pulling the strings,
but maybe we can guide the Mayor's knife-arm a little, using the budget consultation?

Here's
one small suggestion. It's about Town Greens, and the work and
income they provide for an often irrelevant bunch of lawyers.

At
the moment the city council, at public expense, immediately calls in its
own lawyers plus the inspectorate whenever anyone has the nerve to
suggest a bit of council owned land deserves 'Town Green' protection. All too often, it means getting the barristers in, too. Top barristers

It
doesn't actually have to be like that. They can simply take a look at the request, and agree to register.
Just do it. Voluntarily.

True,
registration means that the land in question immediately loses some
of its 'book' value – because it won't attract premium development
prices. But that's never a relevant factor unless the council is
actually contemplating selling it. And it can, instead, recognise
that public 'wellbeing' should come first, and consolidate that
through registration.

Not
all open spaces would deserve such preference – but it's not beyond
the capability of the PROWG Committee, which adjudicates such things,
to establish whether a particular open space merits voluntary registration,
without first having to call in the lawyers and setting up a protracted
legal fight with the applicants.

In
fact, among the last four applications that have gone right through
the process, the PROWG committee considered that two (Castle Park and
Cotswold Road) may not fulfil the legal tests to the letter, but
nonetheless merited voluntary registration. (By the time they
reached that conclusion, the lawyers had already taken their slice
of the council's budget).

In
a third case (Briery Leaze / Whitchurch Green) the council threw a
six-figure sum at 'protecting' its asset against market devaluation
and local residents, and still lost. The public benefit of that futile and costly exercise is that Hengrove people now have a
much valued 'Town Green'.

Whitchurch Green

I
don't know the sums involved (it would probably need a persistent
and long-winded FoI request to get anywhere near the truth), but
they're obviously substantial, and could be used to offset some of
the unkinder cuts to more sensitive parts of the council's body.

Any
change would, I'm sure, be strongly resisted by the main
beneficiaries of the present system, the City Hall lawyers and bean
counters. But it only needs a small change to the present procedure, and, crucially, an
acknowledgement by the mayor that (as PROWG already knows) sometimes voluntary registration is the right
thing to do.

Sunday, 13 January 2013

From
the Bristol Mercury, 12th May 1883 . Printed here
because I'm indebted to Robert Rogers, the 'villain' of the first
case . Not that he'd ever have known it of course.

In
1883 Robert Rogers was just 31 years old, and anything but wealthy.
But he carried the can for the others, and paid the very heavy fine
imposed for illegally moving cattle across the city boundary into the
fields south of Bedminster (perhaps even the Ashton Vale TG site?).

We
know that he died eight years later in the general hospital, of heart
failure; family legend has it that he had been gored by a bull. We
know that he was buried in an unmarked grave in the paupers' plot at
Arnos Vale, presumably at civic expense, leaving a widow and a
two-year old daughter. And we know that Mrs StockwoodPete owes her
being to the three of them!

Then,
as now, cattle movements did need to be regulated; the coming of
railways must have encouraged a surge in shifting the animals to
distant markets, heightening the risk of fast spreading virulent disease,
while reducing the work available for the drovers who used to drive
the beasts across the country. But a 45/- fine?

But
the pages of newspapers – even the same short article - are full of
heavy court sentences for the most minor of crimes. A ten year old
birched for his part in the theft of oranges.... others fined 3/9d
(or 7 days inside) for taking rhubarb. Along with reports of
industrial accidents and fatalities, not to mention the most lurid of
crimes, these old papers make compulsive reading. This one was found
through findmypast.co.uk – but they can also be read for nothing in
the central reference library!

About this Blog

This one's from the little known Bristolian outpost of Stockwood, first settled by city expats back in the fifties. Leafy, open, and close to the countryside.... until they grub up the Green Belt and open spaces to build an 'urban extension'.

Written by an adoptive Stockwoodsman, arrived from the wild north-east back in 2004, this blog sets out to look at Stockwood and Bristol issues, mostly from a green perspective